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WKMS welcomes community members to self-voice self-authored compositions that express opinion, introspection or humor on topics of interest and importance to our audience. If you have an opinion, interest or review you'd like to share with WKMS listeners, please see the guidelines below. The views expressed in commentaries are the opinion of the commentator and don't necessarily reflect the views of WKMS.The station will review every script before it is recorded with respect to:Libel or slander.Content that is more promotional than provocative.Accuracy.Personal attacks and ad hominem attacks.Political or religious content that promotes rather than informs.Appropriate usage, language and form for civil discourse.The station will assist authors with:Making appropriate edits.Bringing the communication to proper time length, generally about 600 words or 3 to 4 minutes of spoken word.Recording the communication in the WKMS studio (unless other arrangements that yield equally acceptable audio are agreed to).Editing the communication and placing it in the WKMS schedule.WKMS will require authors to provide the station a final script that will be filed in the news department and will be placed on the station's web site.WKMS will need authors to provide a suggested introduction for each communication as well as a standard announcer outro script that includes author name, general place of residence, and whatever other personal information might lend authority or authenticity to the communication.WKMS will schedule produced communications and inform the author of time(s). Generally these are aired three times each, but the rotation is solely at the discretion of the station.WKMS will refuse to air communications that violate rules of the Federal Communications Commission for non-commercial, educational stations. Further, WKMS will refuse to air communications that would, for any reason, undermine its goodwill with the audience it serves.If you find these terms agreeable, please email msu.wkmsnews@murraystate.edu to schedule a time in a studio to record.

From the Garden Gate: A Love Affair with Gardening

We're starting a new weekly commentary.  It's titled "From the Garden Gate." It is contributed by Murray resident Roy Helton who divides his time between teaching in the English Department at Murray State University and indulging his passion for gardening. 

I have had a love affair with gardening, in one way or another, for as long as I can remember. I used to spend part of my childhood summers in the small town where my grandmother and great-grandmother lived together in a rambling Victorian era house. They had a large vegetable garden which was plowed and planted by other family members. But my great-grandmother, already in her late 80’s, had her own little garden that she would show to me. Nannie would don her apron and her battered straw hat with its disintegrating brim, pick up her butcher knife from the back porch, and tell me to follow her. It was time to plant. I trailed along behind her as we found our way through the gloom of the long shed that opened into the little fenced spot that she had claimed. The thick banks of blackberry vines enclosing it made my own secret garden. As I looked on, she bent down and demonstrated how to use the heavy blade of the knife to loosen the earth and shape it into mounds where she could plant her cucumber seeds. I felt as if I had entered an inner sanctum to help her perform a ritual I was sure few people could have ever seen, certainly not my sister or my younger brothers.

Back then, gardening—or at least my part in it--had its challenges as well. There was the plum tree, for instance—a treasure in my great-grandmother’s eyes. As far as I could tell the only purpose served by the plum tree was that it littered the grass near the garden gate with overripe fruit which squished between my toes when I was sent out to pick tomatoes or beans. Worse yet, the squashed fruit was an absolute magnet for hordes of wasps and yellow jackets which turned the trip to the garden into a barefoot dance though a minefield of stingers.

I also discovered back then there was much to be learned about plants and their care and their often mysterious ways. For example, I learned how to pronounce “peony.” My grandmother pointed out in her distinctively school teacher voice that the word was pronounced “PEA-ony” and under no circumstances was to be uttered as “pea-OWNY,” a sure sign, according to her, of a lack of not only knowledge, but probably also good breeding.

It was during those summers I began to pay attention to flowers. I look back now and wonder maybe if flowers are in a botanical conspiracy and know who can and can’t be tempted into a life among them. They managed to recruit me during those summers. There were drifts of German irises, and I became fascinated by the beards of the flowers and the curious little rooms that the standards seemed to form at the top of the flower, and the long green, swordlike blades of the leaves. Near the grape arbor there was a bird bath, so badly cracked that it had not held water for years, but it was surrounded by what I came to regard as a small army of phlox, all standing straight up, forming a sort of pink-helmeted palace guard around the bird bath. And the holly hocks—ah, they were the circus come to town.

I’ve come to suspect that people who turn into real gardeners all have a wealth of connections to plants that stretch back into their past and bind that past to the present. Well, here’s to you—from the garden gate.

This is the first in a new weekly commentary series titled "From the Garden Gate" and contributed by Roy Helton who divides his time between teaching in the English Department at Murray State University and indulging his passion for gardening.  

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